What’s New at Twitter ?

Whats New At Twitter?

You may have noticed that Twitter was all over your newsfeed on every social platform the last couple of days. This is mainly because of a few BIG changes that have been hotly anticipated.

The shake ups first began back in July of 2015 when Jack Dorsey returned to the top role at Twitter after an absence spent developing Square, a card reader for smart phones.

Dorsey oversaw the appointment of several new board members, including BET CEO Debra Lee earlier this month. Twitter appears to have a razor like focus on new ideas and innovations and the team has not disappointed! Just this week we have learned that media attachments and @names no longer count toward the 140 character limit!

Marketers rejoice!

We have a few more characters to work with in our tweets! This is exciting because even with a URL shortener like bitly, internet addresses can be grievously long, forcing even the most succinct copywriter among us to edit ruthlessly. Remember the good old days when we had to leave additional room for potential retweets? Yes, progress is good. Speaking of retweets; It was also just announced that we can now retweet ourselves!

Increased Reach or just more Noise?

Now those weren’t the only gifts from the little blue bird, we also learned that tweets beginning with a user’s @name will now be visible in regular feeds even without the period in front of the @. If you’re wondering what I’m talking about; Previously when you started a tweet with an @mention only followers of both you and the person you mentioned would see the tweet in their feeds. If you wanted to create a public conversation you had to place a period first. Many a well intentioned public tweet has been withheld from the public eye because of period + @mention ignorance — but no more. We can now clog up the feed with conversations — I joke — but this is still something the gracious Tweeter should consider.

So what does all these changes mean for you?

Well, I think it means that Twitter is still relevant or at least fighting to be and to my mind, thats a good thing. A company not resting on it’s laurels and willing to shake things up to keep my attention is one I’m happy to continue to work with (er.. on). By working to create a better, more intuitive user experience (UX) Twitter is telling me that I matter. This is particularly noteworthy as image heavy favourite Instagram moves to implement a more Facebookian style of algorithm, one which will eventually require us to pay to play just like on the parent site. We will, and it will be worth it but it still stings a bit.